Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Something Global: is it gaming via tweeting or just tweeting?

In Something Global, you play an ape rising up against humanity in rebellion in pretend and tweet about it in real life. Your success as an ape rebel depends on how many favorites you get.

This officially blows my mind. Mostly because I don't tweet and I don't understand that environment very well. I'm assuming that favorite works the same way as likes do in Facebook and I barely even use that.

Seriously, I've pretty much described the game it's entirety in the first paragraph.

I have looked at and played some odd games. Microscope is about building a timeline and I've played it via email. Lexicon is a writing game about building your own fictional wiki. Happy Birthday, Robot has you tell a story literally one sentence at a time.

But Something Global feels like it crosses a I line for me. After all, isn't the idea of tweeting to get people to read whatever you posted and to give you some kind of thumbs up for it? Something Global sounds like doing normal tweeting behavior and coaches it in the terms of a bunch of apes doing it.

Am I looking at a game or social commentary? Is Something Global a game or an experiment or satire? (Okay, it can easily be all three but which one was the designer's primary goal?)

Something Global is part of the Indie Mixtape Megamix, a big collection of tiny little RPGs. The vast majority of them, while minimalist, are clearly designed to be played. I have to wonder if Something Global was designed simply to be observed.